Friday, June 6, 2008
Is anyone in your house pooping on your towels? Do you have a sudden hankering to spend time at a nudist colony? Have you ever felt like you betrayed your apartment because you moved to a new one?
These are just a few of the experiences New York Times best-selling author and NPR commentator David Sedaris shares with you in his series of personal essay collections, the latest one, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In this assortment of witty, often painfully revealing essays, Sedaris describes his journey to give up smoking, a loved habit he’s had for most of his life. His adventure takes him to Tokyo, where he discovers hard truths about himself, his country, and his grammar.
It is not just the entertaining quality of his stories that grab his audience. It’s
that somewhere in all of us, he touches a cord. It may be the fly in the corner of your window that you name and talk to first thing in the morning. Are you a man that shops in the the women’s department for pants that fit only to realize the problem when you are at the urinal with pants that zip up the back? Perhaps your lover has better childhood stories than you do, so you claim them as your own at parties. Whatever the secret story is in your life, Sedaris will trump it - and you will feel certain that his story is much more embarrassing than your own.
All of Sedaris’s books are offered on audiobooks at your local bookstore or library, and because Sedaris reads them himself in his deadpan delivery and subtle timing, it’s well-worth it to listen to them in addition to reading them. While enjoying his books in order is not necessary, it does add to the reading enjoyment as the Sedaris family begins to feel like your own crazy set of relatives.
